I pick my spots as best as I can on Belize’s air media, and the spot I picked one morning, the Vibes, led my ears to hear Brother Hilaire Bennett gushing all over Alaia Belize, the new Ashcroft-owned hotel in San Pedro. Based on all the bases I covered during the time of the champagne-pouring on the steps of that new grand hotel, bases that include air and print, nobody went gaga like Hilly.

I respect business; the rich and famous of the world can go wherever they want to, and if they choose Alaia Belize over the French Riviera, where my former hero, Manuel Heredia, and football hero, Erwin Contreras, vacationed, it’s all great for Belize. I bet if that hotel is successful, the people who work there will get paid handsomely, sure expect so, and maybe we will get some taxes from the profits, and those are great things, when workers get a nice take-home for their family, and taxes land in our national treasury.

God forbid that any lucky worker upsets Ms. Sandra Coye by stopping off on the way home for a couple “slugs”, and some good old banter with their friends about the doings of our wicked politicians. They’ll probably have to wade home instead of going by golf cart to escape that out-and-out traitor, Louis Wade. No man should speak disparagingly about brothers sharing a friendly drink.

Every right-thinking person under the sun knows Jesus was aligned perfectly with His Father when He turned that water into wine. I don’t think Jesus would have been harsh with Louis, because the brother isn’t entirely a bad sort, just woefully misguided on a number of issues. Since he’s no greedy blue-note hunter, I bet Jesus would have said, kindly, “Friend, what are you doing here? This is a wedding, a feast. You know the saying about the occasion — time to eat, be merry, and drink.”

Ah, we all read the speech by Comrade Assad in The Belize Times – bully, he has the time to be thinking beautiful revolutionary thoughts because we already got the response to our neighbor all prepared – aha, our brother laid it down about the direction of our beloved Belize.

It is disappointing that any economist in a country like ours can believe that ridiculous trickle-down could make all of us win. We are not the US, a country that is earning gobs of money all over the world because they control so much. Only a country like that can play that trickle-down game.

We, if we want to win, we must own a big share of the businesses in our country. Bully for Alaia Belize, but for every one of those, there must be a hundred locally-owned small hotels.

Blatant discrimination against daag daktaz

The word around was that Dr. Tewes was in as CEO at KHMH, and then, just as suddenly, we learned that Dr. Tewes was out, out because, according to story, a hue and cry went up about his expertise being in lesser animal care, not human beings. Bah, there’s nothing new under the sun. Everything in this world has a root, and the source for this criminal discrimination begins with the flippin’ chain-smoking, coffee-drinking Melvin Hulse from Stann Creek.

Some might give Mel a pass because his opponent in the 1998 general election was Dr. Henry Canton, a mighty well-off scion of the George Price family, and the handwriting was on the wall for all UDPs. Melvin, who won in 1993, was desperately trying to hold on to his seat, so desperate he went low, really low, describing his opponent as nothing but a daag dakta. What the people needed, Melvin said, was a worker, a man who could get the job done, not one whose profession was injecting dewormer, like Ivomec.

At the time of that election Dr. Canton was the GM of the Citrus Company of Belize, and it didn’t matter to the big wigs of that company that he was licensed to treat animals, not raise citrus plants and harvest their fruits and run a processing plant. They obviously saw some qualities that could raise their management level. For the record, Brother Henry would vanquish Melvin and become Minister of Works and other things in a PUP government.

Well, Canton didn’t want to face that savage attack again, the disparaging of his noble profession, or was it the mighty big plans he had to take over all of Belize’s citrus industry, or was it that he knew the deceiving PUP was about to implode, for in 2003 he and his friends sought out Brother Rado and handed him the seat on a silver platter. Yes, on a silver platter.

Fast forward to 2021 – hmm, does our Dr. Chebat have Multiple Personality Disorder, the split personality? Before the PUP’s jump on me, look, da man is just a human being, and we know that if God has a fault, it is that He packed too many brain cells into little craniums.

This wedding splash at the Biltmore, it’s causing me to worry about myself. I’m the type who doesn’t want to know “who”, but in this case I’m really eeching to know more — who the couple was that got married, what kind of families could cause our big bad Chebat to act like a soft Michel. What was their campaign contribution? Is someone blackmailing our hero? Seriously, ONE vaccine!

Ah, you see what happens when you lose your creds. Same week, the Ministry of Health and Wellness knights a renowned daag dakta who it is said has senior administrative abilities, and the nurses run away from him like the man rabid.

Whoa, I am not about hibbing words at nurses, definitely not in this time when they are performing like firefighters in the heat of a blaze in a block of wooden houses, but I have to tell them that I will not give my vote for blatant discrimination. I am very partial to daag daktaz. They know as much medicine as any Cuellar or Bulwer, and animal da animal, no matter the form. Naturally, we love human beings more than dogs and puss, but when it comes to the working parts, God didn’t bother to give us anything He didn’t give them.

There are so many diseases that jump from animals and affect human beings, we should have no problem with the equality. HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Covid, Meningitis, Rabies, Bird Flu, Swine Flu…and then there is the number of deadly diseases we get from insects. Would we accept an entomologist who has tremendous administrative skills? Do you know it was a daag dakta, Dr. Michael Deshield, who led the charge to save our country from unnecessary, environment-threatening and maybe health-degrading GMO?

Sirs, Madams, it’s no shame to be a daag dakta.

First phase of Camalote pathway complete

Our Ministry of Infrastructure had much difficulty to continue our pathway in spots, and the same problem they are encountering in our village, they will encounter in a couple others. The trouble came about because the Barrow government was awash in loan funds, and they had to spend it on their people.

Preparing for climate change, they put in some deep drains, and wherever there was a residential lot, they put in a culvert; most of them they didn’t need. Apart from wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars, they messed up the terrain for our pathway.

Bah, when you enter Roaring Creek you enter culvert zone. It’s culvert after culvert — big, massive culverts by the dozens. In our village everything could have been settled with an inner road adjacent to the highway, and just a few culverts. Surely they could have found some more productive way to spend the people’s money on their friends. What a waste, because there was absolutely no honest creativity in our last government.